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hypnosec writes "The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has begun updating its Battlespace2 and other simulations to bring them in line with commercial wargames like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. Andrew Poulter heads up the technical team behind the war-game and said that while back in the '80s and '90s, military simulations were state of the art, today they have fallen far behind commercial alternatives in terms of graphics and plot. With that in mind, the MoD has been investing heavily in what's known as 'Project Kite' (knowledge information test environment), designed to bring the training software to the forefront of military shooters. Some of this is down to the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they've gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier how to react in certain situations."

The Unreal (not tournament) series had a great unfolding story about life on alien worlds.Doom had a simple, yet interesting plot that you got into. This was nicely followed with each title in the series.Gear of War? While I haven't played that, the story telling is supposed to be great?And even going back to days when FPS was still in infancy, what about titles like Heretic [wikipedia.org]?Dead Space? Deus Ex? You can't play a few games online without touching the single player mode of a game and say it has no plot or that no-one plays for the plots.

War and peace *is* boring. I read super fucking fast so most books play out in my head like a movie. If they don't, you know the book is slow and tedious. I got about a chaper and a half into Shogun, for example, before I burned it for light to read something good.

"wow. modern society is truly spiritually dead. if that is what passes for a 'plot'."

Game plots are not just voice acting and text, they have to do with the art design of a world, the game is EXPERIENCED in real time unlike books where the images are made up by each individual and each individual has a different experience of a book.

The doom universe is an interesting one to BE in. We've had story based games with excellent plots that bombed financially because they were not immediately immersive (planesca

Well, modern education is certainly dead if that's what passes for capitalization these days. (Zing!)

Seriously, though, of course Doom had a plot. A plot is a sequence of events in a narrative. A plot can be very simple, or very complex. And, yes, even Ms. Pacman had a plot, after a fashion, it's just that the player provided the plot during gameplay. Due to the nature of games, plot is generated during play to a greater or lesser extent by the player(s). Now, did Doom have a lot of backstory? That's differ

It's a different type of "plot". In MW3 or in squad level combat the "story" is not in prose format. It is a progression of situational action that the user must be aware of in order to "read" the plot. Plus, squad level combat is "multi-player" and requires fluid reaction to squad-mates decisions, good and bad.

A few hours ago, Mars received a garbled message from Phobos. "We require immediate military support. Something fraggin' evil is coming out of the Gateways! Computer systems have gone berserk!" The rest was incoherent. Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky. Since then, attempts to establish contact with either moon have been unsuccessful.

You and your buddies, the only combat troop for fifty million miles were sent up pronto to Phobos. You were ordered to secure the perimeter of the base while the rest of the team went inside. For several hours, your radio picked up the sounds of combat: guns firing, men yelling orders, screams, bones cracking, then finally, silence. Seems your buddies are dead.

That's the only thing that kept me playing Bioshock... I didn't care for the gameplay but I enjoyed the story. Actually, the story is what keeps me going through most FPS single player modes... if the story is really good I'll forgive the campaign for sucking otherwise, sort of like if a book is really good I'll forgive the author if they're not the world's greatest writer.

These games often take part using real rifles to aid in the training process as it's cheaper and easier than having guys out on a range.

Small difference between that and CoD using a controller.

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Putting a real rifle in their hand isn't going to easily remove years and years of disillusioned immortality. Good luck to them surviving on an actual battlefield where bullets hurt and frag grenades kill, not just turn your vision red and vibrate a piece of fucking plastic in your hand. And standing there breathing for 45 seconds doesn't suddenly heal you.

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Your hands are working, but nothing is coming out.

There's TONS of FPS games that have realistic damage models. We could go back to Tactical Ops for Unreal Tournament, which is like cheaterstrike without the goofy classes, with more realistic weapons, and with many one-hit-kills. A hit with anything in the head with no head armor will off you almost every time, sometimes you can take a glancing 9mm.

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Your hands are working, but nothing is coming out.

There's TONS of FPS games that have realistic damage models...

Yeah, and how many are 1) popular and relevant with todays gamers, and/or 2) enabled by default?

It's not near as simple as you paint it when a realistic damage model is hardly ever actually played by gamers or written into the game. The brainwashed immortality of default settings still has to be overcome.

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Putting a real rifle in their hand isn't going to easily remove years and years of disillusioned immortality. Good luck to them surviving on an actual battlefield where bullets hurt and frag grenades kill, not

That's okay. In 40-100 years, we'll be killing 3rd world citizens with remotely piloted terminators, which will completely into line with current FPS shooters.

Oh yes, I see the writing on the wall, and totally agree with you. I'm certain that Predator Drone pilots likely cut their teeth on flight simulators, which would make sense due to the 1:1 realism there. The type of ground warfighting model you predict is coming, sooner or later.

But until we get there, most people kinda know their bodies != what's on screen. And the ones that do think that, well, a round of darwin awards on me.

Uh, no. Most people who have played FPS games and basically never done anything in real life don't, and that was kind of my entire point in targeting and tailoring training around FPS gamers. Run out into the middle of a street

The FPS-style training games the Canadian military use have been very successful. I know this because I've chatted with people involved (my school provides many of the development staff in the form of grad students; programmers and artists, the military provides the designers and subject matter experts). In particular, one sargeant in charge of the more normal, "old-school" training was very impressed by the difference in soldiers he recieved for training who had taken the game-training first before being s

So remember slashdot, national militaries use these games as both training and propaganda, but actually there's no relation between video games and violent acts.

Well, it's not like these are two mutually contradictory positions, is it?

I mean, does playing Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane make you more likely to fly airplanes? Does playing Angry Birds make you more likely to throw birds at pigs? Does playing Deus Ex make you more likely to get implants? Does playing World of Warcraft make you more likely to do the Safety Dance [youtube.com]?

Even if a video game can train you in skills transferable to real life (and honestly, if you've played MW3 or BF3, you'd know that they're not at all realistic except maybe in the graphics department), that doesn't mean that it somehow forces you to use those skills.

Haven't tried to verify from a credible source, but I've heard that plane hijackers (including the 9/11 incident) often use MS Flight Simulator as a sort of basic training for flying the planes they hijack. Of course, sitting in a cockpit is a lot easier to simulate realistically in a game than charging tanks.

And I do the safety dance plenty often without having ever played WoW.

I am not sure that it is possible to make a vehicle look like a hollow box made out of green, red and blue Pool Noodles [wikipedia.org]. Also, the octagonal wheels found in most graphics from the 80's would give the vehicles terrible handling.

Hopefully they don't take Battlefield's system of how the game progresses as part of the "realism" that they are after. The game, while it does have great graphics, sound, etc., it shouldn't be used as anything similar to a training ground. While I'm sure the "realism" aspect is there somewhere, there are too many glaring aspects about Battlefield that makes it obvious that it is Just A Video Game.

And what plot? Not only are the plots in FPS games lacking in almost all cases, but how do they compare to a pl

Like most Americans, you have no grasp of European culture whatever. We see you lot, especially Chuck Norris, as some kind of primative wild beast. We expect grown-ups, and in most cases, children also, to resolve problems without resort to violence.

WW1 may have been a bit like that in some places, but WWII was not. Not sure about "alpha males" but the "smart guys" were generally not posted to the front. but had managerial roles that made them too important to be put in risky places. The people who went

As a matter of fact, I'm a grandson of italians, french, danes and spaniards raised in Peru and living in Spain for many years now. I know what I'm talking about.It's good not to resort to violence. What's wrong is the current inability of europeans to do so even at the cost of their own lives. The rest of the world is not as byzantine as modern Europe, and we know what happened to Constantinople.

you cant take a rocket propelled grenade in the face in real life for only 25% health damage like you can in many FPS's

That's the point I have with FPSs. They are realistic but not really. You don't get into a "due I could die here" mood which would lift the game to a different level. It 'd train the brain in making better split second decision. I should assume that military level gaming would concentrate on mission completion while still getting out alive and that that would be where they differ from commercial games. And I'm not sure there's a market for plots like "Wanna be a soldier? Good, let's start by playing chess."

I used to play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (the original PC version) a lot, as well as the good old Rainbow Six series. I usually set up a game with 15 min rounds, no respawn, no threat indicators (a cursor that showed roughly in which direction the enemy is). The games were one shot, kill. Some people complained that it was boring, but I liked it. Your heart would beat like crazy at times. When your whole team was gone with only you left, you would definitely feel the pressure knowing the whole other team was

Ghost recon sure does a lot in the realistic department (sometimes up to annoying in single player) but I do believe playing Multiplayer under those conditions would be joyful. Perhaps I should try it one day, under those rules.

Paintball is a lot more up close an personal that most casualties in war, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan where you are more likely to suddenly explode while driving along a road than get shot.

That is the way to to play and win. Kill people from a long, long way away where there is no chance of them killing you instead. It is extremely effective which is why we are willing to sacrifice so many lives and legs to defusing bombs rather than just detonating them from a safe distance. The intel you can gather

This book is presently in use with the Military Simulations industry ( or at least with specific companies within it ) as a context model to help people understand why simulation technology is important.

If you want to examine the ethics behind testing of human subjects for reactions, you can also read "Turing Evolved" which is set 28 years after Military Diorama and is also a free book. http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/34627 [smashwords.com]

Both of the books are free to download and distribute ( released as "Shareware" ), well reviewed on all major ebook sites and both examine the technology of military simulations and the ethics behind them. One of the larger military simulation companies reviewed both stories and now uses them as a context model to explain where the technology is going and what it's purposes are for. They described Military Diorama as "A lot closer to the truth than many of us like to admit"

the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they've gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier

Unless, I don't know, you want a soldier to know how to react to a situation in a professional, reasonable, efficient, safe, appropriate and lawful manner.

All the games will teach him is "Don't touch the door until your sergeant tells you to open it", "headshot the bad guy at the first opportunity" and "don't use your initiative because we didn't program in that path of action".

Please, if you're not the UK, do use MW3 as your military training aid.

AA:O completely took me by surprise many years ago. Who thought that the US Army of all things would produce a tactical shooter that was ACTUALLY good!?

Of course, being the geniuses they are, they managed to fuck it up, though it did take a little while. The Special Forces patch is where, after that, it started to really go downhill. It stopped being a 'video game' and became just a 'promotional tool'. Which it always was, but that's still not an excuse to let quality bottom out...

AA has always favored accurate simulation over pure entertainment because it was originally conceived as a recruitment tool first and foremost. It's often criticized for this by gamers but they forget that AA was not designed primarily for entertainment. It doesn't really compete with the entertainment-oriented and consumer-focused "tactical" shooter games like Battlefield and Call of Duty. Instead, it tries to present a semi-accurate representation of what it might be like to become a soldier. Of course, e

Mercs are already killing people with drones, security contractors are just mercs so just call them what they are. Police are already using drones for surveillance. Probably is a matter of time before they're weaponized, but you'll always need jackboots on the ground to control a citizenry.

I feel it is disturbing using video games to program the mind to be comfortable with death and killing. But reality is that in heavy situations, the amount of hesitation over killing in battle and subsequent shell shock results can be as high as 1:1. Meaning 1/2 of ur men could become effectively useless in heavy battle. Providing a framework for the mind to accept and rationalise the horrors that can occur is essential in getting the most efficiency out of ur men.
I hate to admit it, but a soldier who doe

What makes you think we have to? Unless Hitler is invading tomorrow, we don't "have to" do anything of the sort. We go to war because we choose to do so. (and come to think of it, that's even more sad)

I had a job for three years as a developer on a 3d engine (Image Generator) for the military.

In theory, you could make some great graphics for this stuff. Because normally it's running on a dedicated box that you are building from scratch and delivering as part of a solution, that you can stuff the highest end graphics card imaginable into. Moreover, since the simulation needs to be high end, most of the physics, AI, and control are handled by an entirely separate computer, leaving yours free to just render network packets.

However, then it starts to get difficult. One technical issue is that most of these simulations are running on network using different military simulation protocols. Protocols that are not designed to handle quick-twitch gamer reactions, or good animations, but to show symbols on a top down map. Moreover, depending on what your packet source it is, it may be difficult to get positional updates regularly enough to even make a plane "fly" smoothly - let alone handling infantry reactions quickly enough. Not to mention that the engine I worked on could support play boxes a couple hundred miles across... in CoD3 you can only see a few hundred yards at a time. Imagine walking across all of the generated terrain in the MS flight sims...except for it all has to be accurate to aerial footage.

But that isn't the real problem with making the engines look nice. The real problem is that the brass don't care about good lighting or artwork. They mostly care about your support tool setup, how easily it integrates, how cheap it is, and how big of an playbox you can support well. This means that the number of artists on a project is 1/50th of that on a good title.

Most modern games have a small core of engineers, and then hordes and hordes of artists tweaking every aspect of the characters and levels. The shop I worked at had about 3 programmers and a single 3d artist, who also had to do the animation and texturing. Our competitors had two programmers and an artist. I know one major IG shop, one of the big names in flight sims, who were down to one developer.

Even selling your licenses at something like 10-20k per seat, you can't afford to hire many artists. There's steady work providing these solutions, but there isn't the "make it big" potential. The market is too niche, fairly fragmented, and not driven by graphics.

And that was the commercial side of things. The military itself had a couple engines that it always was paying someone to work on, but they tended to look even worse. They'd usually try to get contractors to work on them as part of implementing a larger training setup, but the contractors had no incentive to do more than the bare minimum on that engine than to get that one sim up and running.

I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, the backend engine part of most military sims is a harder and more annoying problem than it is in video games, every deployment requires weird custom code, and there's little to no monetary incentive to spend cash on the armies of artists it takes to make a game look good...

Which is too bad, because everyone writing these engines *really* want to make them look good;-)

UK Afghanistan veteran (summer past) here. I have never heard of this game.
In our unit we had something called a SAAT indoor electronic range. It offered a series of acted out simulations that soldiers/marines 'walked through' and at the end gave a report with accuracy of shot, etc and a replay of the scenario so you could see fall of shot and how well individuals coped with life/death decisions. It was obviously photo realistic and had real (deactivated) weaponry with a few added sensors. I could be wron

Some of this is down to the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they've gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier how to react in certain situations."

You are saying it's a step down, yet there is a huge disparity between playing a shooter with a keyboard and mouse, or a controller vs holding a weighted weapon replica,